Walter Peters was an aviation pioneer

Retired major Walter Peters stands in front of a Canadair CT-114 Tutor jet used by the Snowbirds at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa last February. Peters, who was born in Litchfield, Annapolis County, in 1937, became Canada’s first black jet fighter pilot and was also a member of Canada’s famed Snowbirds flight team. He died in Ottawa on Sunday after complications from a stroke. (Canada Aviation and Space Museum)

WALTER PETERS, a retired military officer from Annapolis County who Ottawa says was Canada’s first black jet fighter pilot and who was involved in the development of the iconic Snowbirds, has died. He was 76.

Peters died Sunday in Ottawa, a relative in Halifax said Tuesday. Juanita Peters said he died in hospital of complications from a stroke.

She said Peters was “a very gentle, humble man” who only shared his numerous accomplishments in recent years.

“He was not a man to talk about his life in that way,” said Juanita Peters. “It’s only been (during) the last few years of his life that he has even felt comfortable talking about his personal story.”

By all accounts, Peters had a stellar career with the Royal Canadian Air Force after enlisting at age 24. Prior to starting pilot training, he had worked for the City of Saint John and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

Peters was born in Litchfield, Annapolis County, in 1937, the youngest of six children. He graduated from Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., and did postgraduate work at the University of Southern California.

Juanita Peters said hers was the only African-Nova Scotian family in Litchfield, a rural community connected to the fishing and lumber industries.

“There’s a great photo of (Walter’s) dad and a couple of the uncles and they’re all in native dress,” she said. “They’re all at a ceremony, and it’s like turn of the century.”

She said the last time she saw Walter was in 2011, at a conference in Dartmouth. He told the conference he had faced many challenges in life but was able to overcome them with education, hard work and perseverance.

“We had our own house (but) we didn’t have a lot of money,” Peters said at the event. “I used to look at the clothes that my brother wore with envy, knowing that sooner or later they would become mine.”

Later, living in “the slums of Saint John” with his family, Peters stuck to his guns when he was unhappily directed to a vocational school.

“I didn’t want to be there because it didn’t have the courses that I wanted,” he said. Peters fought for, and won, a transfer to a different school.

Juanita Peters said Walter had been living in the Ottawa area for decades.

He is survived by his wife, adult children and grandchildren, she said.

According to Veterans Affairs Canada, Peters helped establish the Snowbirds air team and later flew with them. He was a flying instructor during his career, and he “also became the Canadian Armed Forces’ first human rights officer,” a government website says.

Peters did some international security work, too, as an adviser to the United Nations Security Council.

He “offered advice on the tactical movement of troops by air and analyzed and briefed the council” after the Russian air force downed a Korean jetliner in 1983, a Veterans Affairs website says.

It says “he was Canada’s first black jet fighter pilot and an A1 flying instructor.”

While at the UN in New York, Peters gave troop travel and other advice to the secretary general.

“I remember sitting on the 32nd floor of the United Nations, allowing myself to daydream, and say: ‘Boys, this is a long way from Litchfield, Nova Scotia,’” he told a Veterans Affairs interviewer years ago.

Peters became an air force pilot in the turbulent 1960s and retired with the rank of major. Other black pilots — two men who a letter writer to The Chronicle Herald said were originally from other countries — were in the Canadian air force in the 1950s.

Peter Fillmore of Halifax wrote this newspaper in 2011 to say one man was his flying instructor at an airbase in Saskatchewan, and the other was a fellow pilot.

Peters told Veterans Affairs his first solo flight in the air force climaxed with the triumph of landing safely.

“You start to breathe a sigh of relief and then you get a feeling of accomplishment — ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it’ — and then you taxi into the flight line and there you’re met by your buddies,” he said.

Veterans Affairs said Peters was deployed on assorted missions around the world and “enjoyed a distinguished career on many levels.”

February is African Heritage Month in Nova Scotia. The Harper government said earlier this month that black Canadians have a long history of service in the Armed Forces.

A memorial service for Peters is to take place this weekend in Ottawa.